Saturday, May 10, 2014

(graphs)-[:ARE]->(everywhere)

Entities linked through relations are just everywhere. Social networks, biological entities, publications, any database tables joined with a foreign key etc. are countless examples but often not represented as graphs. Many tools exist to visualize them and this post will introduce my favorite five allowing to interact with a graph in a modern web browser: graphviz, neo4j, cytoscape.js, sigma.js and d3.js.
By far, we will not cover all the cool features of these tools (hei, this a simple blog post, not a book!) but rather give a short introduction to each of them. We will focus on small graphs with force layout methods, as it is the most general purpose one.